07/06/2026
I am actually a little late writing this update. In reality, I am five months and eight days sober... and I think the reason I am late writing it is because I have reached the point in my yearly sobriety where I no longer check the app that tracks it obsessively. I can chalk this up to changing content creation habits, where I spend less time with my head buried in my phone, or I can chalk it up to the fact that not drinking has become so firmly baked into my day-to-day life that it never even crosses my mind.
If it's your first time reading one of these updates, I give up drinking for an extended period of time and isolate my casual drinking to the latter months of the year. It's something I have done for years simply because, by the time I am 40 (18 months from now), I want to give up completely. Acclimatising to that goal in the build-up to it will feel much easier than imposing a date-based prohibition on myself.
I write these because I am acutely aware that public accountability makes it easier to stay on course, and because keeping this kind of diary helps contextualise the benefits of sobriety for those who are either considering giving up, or for those who drink so casually that they simply don't notice the ways in which it impacts their lives. For example, someone who drinks only once every couple of weeks can still experience noticeable increases in stress levels, reduced quality of sleep, and a general lethargy that comes on so slowly that people easily confuse it with a feature of who they are, rather than an external influence acting upon their physiology.
I am, in every respect, a workaholic. I am self-aware enough to admit that. But until quite recently, the workload I was setting myself was genuinely making me miserable. To the point, in fact, that I was approaching both mental and physical burnout.
Perhaps you're new to this page and don't realise that my modus operandi used to be posting every hour of every day. Something that required me to live inside my phone. Whilst I had convinced myself, and told others, that I could do that in perpetuity... everyone who warned me was absolutely correct.
Today, my sense of calm and control is clearly reflected in this page. As opposed to making hundreds of videos a month out of some bizarre and self-inflicted sense of duty, I now post two videos a day in a coherent, documentary-style, long-form format. Subjects are organised into playlists. That organisation and control are very much an extension of sobriety. I am self-aware enough to acknowledge that.
Today, I get more time with my family. I have controlled and sensible routines for content creation, and I have fallen in love with my hobby again after that bizarre sense of duty had genuinely caused me to hate it.
What's amazing is that this level of organisation allows me to spread content across five separate platforms with the same methodical care. Which means we are growing everywhere as a result of order and attention to detail, rather than growing disproportionately on whichever platform happens to own my focus.
I feel that, in many ways, I have got my life back. A life that was suffocating under the weight of its own sense of duty. It means I now spend three hours a day creating content instead of four days a week—which, I kid you not, was my old system.
There are few physiological benefits to report that haven't already appeared in previous blogs, because most of the physical benefits occur within the first four months. The fifth month, however, has largely been about emotional wellbeing and control. I now exist outside of my phone and am able to focus on tangible projects and public speaking opportunities that would otherwise have been sidelined because I knew there would always be content waiting to be created.
By Luke J. Timberlake ✏️
